Starting with the Academy Awards. Proving that the whore of the press have no claim to respectability or honesty, Anna Lewis (COSMOPOLITAN) types, "Warren Beatty, who was presenting the award with Faye Dunaway, read out La La Land, [. . .]"

No, he did not.

Warren did not read out any winner.

He gave an exasperated look and handed Faye Dunaway the envelope and she searched what was written and then declared LA LA LAND.

What took place was the Academy's fault.

It was not Faye's fault and it certainly wasn't Warren's. (As long
disclosed here, Warren is a personal friend and I'll be damned if the
press is going to get away with lying about him. Which is why, late
last night, I made a point to weigh in on this with "The press lying never ends.")

It is the Academy's fault, it is PricewaterhouseCoopers' fault.

Let's quote the statement from the accounting firm:

The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope
and when discovered, was immediately corrected. We are currently
investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this
occurred. We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy,
ABC, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation.

As I said last night, Warren and Faye were handed the wrong envelope.

And PwC is present to prevent this from happening.

Brief history, true or not, Bette Davis always claimed she was supposed
to be nominated for OF HUMAN BONDAGE and her name was inadvertently left
off the ballot that year and, as a compromise, voters were allowed to
write in a nominee for Best Actress in the voting round.

The year after, what is now PwC took over the ballot counting.

She claimed it as a victory.

In the seventies, when Barbra Streisand was up for an Academy Award for
composing "Evergreen" her friend Neil Diamond, who was already announced
to present the award for Best Song, joked that he'd announce Barbra
regardless of who won.

Though he was only joking, a few people got bent out of shape and the
Academy had to clarify that the accounting firm's representatives were
on hand at the ceremonies to ensure that something like that never
happened.

In the 90s, an actress won and Charlie Sheen and others spread lies that
she wasn't supposed to win, that her name was called by mistake. PwC
could have stepped forward to end that rumor but they did not. The
actress won the award (and deserved it). I'm not reprinting her name
here because this vicious lie should have ended long ago.

As I said last night, I don't know what made the TV screens.

I do know what happened in the auditorium.

Warren didn't announce the winner.

Faye did.

As people came on stage from LA LA LAND to accept, a friend leaned up
(seated on the row behind me) and asked, "What's Warren doing?"

I had no idea.

But he was speaking to everyone on the stage, some of whom dismissed whatever he was saying.

What he was doing was attempting to stop the acceptance speech because
he knew the envelope they'd been given wasn't for Best Picture.

Warren did PwC's job.

If anything, he's to be thanked.

The show would have ended without the correction if Warren hadn't
stepped up and done the job that the Academy was apparently too cowardly
to do itself.

Warren didn't do anything wrong and saved the ceremonies because we'd
otherwise be reading this morning, "Day after handing out trophies,
Academy announces Best Picture winner didn't really win."

The Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari stated on Monday that
his country intends to fight ISIL in Syria on the basis of protecting
the Iraqi territories from the threats of the terrorist group, not
interfering in the Syrian affairs.Al-Jaafari told the Russian
news agency that the Iraq forces will strike the terrorists within the
Syrian territories in case they pose an extended threat against the
Iraqi territories.

And it is the same organization.

Day 133 of The Mosul Slog.

And today there may be a change in US policy but most likely it will be the same.

We'll find out around mid-day.

But for now, it remains the same as it's been since August of 2014: send in more US troops and bomb the country.

If there was a point to that, it was to create space for political reconciliation.

Only the latter didn't take place.

In that regard, it was like Bully Boy Bush's "surge."

Remember that?

Iraq was in trouble politically and security wise.

It was 2007, Bully Boy Bush sent more US troops in.

The point?

To improve security with US troops allowing the Iraqi politicians to focus on the reconciliation.

The rise of the Islamic State was facilitated by sectarian
tensions among Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Sunni and Kurdish
populations, and in particular by the discrimination against Sunnis by a
Shiite-led Baghdad government backed by Iran. After the fall of Mosul
in 2014 the Obama administration helped to engineer the removal of Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who fomented the sectarianism, and his
replacement by the more moderate Haider al-Abadi, who pledged to build a
more inclusive regime. Mr. Abadi’s good intentions have mostly been
thwarted by sectarian hard-liners, including Iranian-controlled Shiite militia groups.Consequently,
the military offensive to recapture Mosul has gone ahead without
accompanying political steps that might strengthen moderate Sunni
leaders against militants who will seek to perpetuate an insurgency
against the Baghdad government. A report this month
from the Institute for Study of War warned, “Early indicators suggest
that a post-ISIS Sunni insurgency may be forming in Iraq and al Qaeda
(AQ) is trying to gain traction within it.” It said, “the U.S.-backed
Coalition has been focused only on eliminating ISIS, not other insurgent
groups or the conditions that grow them.”